ESPN sleeping on baseball

You can get a pretty good idea of the sporting priorities of the American public by watching ESPN. By that I mean, while the network can drive you crazy harping on a topic day and night (hello, Tim Tebow), it wouldn’t be doing that if research told a different story.

People want the NFL, in any shape form or day of the week.

Adding in a regular Thursday game? Sure, if demand holds.

And so far it has.

But how about some love for Major League Baseball? The final days are chock full of stories, with races and playoff positioning up for grabs in the last few innings of the regular season.

Tuesday night I turned on ESPN to watch the final innings of the Orioles-Rays game, or see back and forth coverage of the important games and maybe how Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera was faring, only to find this on the stations:

ESPN: World Series of Poker

ESPN2: WNBA

ESPN3: Who knows?

Yikes.

Speaking of Cabrera, can you imagine if his historic pursuit was in football how much coverage it would be generating? For crying out loud, Brett Favre considering coming out of retirement was deemed worthy of blanket coverage, while Cabrera in sight of something that hasn’t happened in 45 years is almost an afterthought.